February Rain
by Aurylie
Summary: For the loss he can never escape and for all the distance he has traveled. Sam-centered oneshot.


**This was once apart of a larger story titled "As it Began', which was accidentally deleted last month. I've decided to repost each chapter as a separate story, since they're technically one-shots. **

**I hope you enjoy!**

**Disclaimer: It all belongs to CBS.**

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><p>Sam writes letters.<p>

He writes them in the early morning hours with the lights off and the TV running silently behind him.

He writes them to people buried beneath their own hatreds and men who died in the middle of the day with no warning.

And the words feel a little empty in the shadows of an apartment he does not love, because he is only saying things they probably already knew and he cannot make himself admit that maybe he's the one that has been left behind in that desert.

He seals the envelopes and writes the date.

They are all locked away in places he forgot to forget, and he dreams they are much farther away than they will ever really be.

**xxx**

That shallow grave becomes something more in memory than what it ever actually was.

The dirt and the panic and his chest that would not open and the air he could not find are replaced with an endless universe of things he does not know how to explain. He sees his grandmother in her old rocking chair that shifts restlessly by the fireplace and he feels the rain on his arms and this fuzzy kind of peace in his heart.

And somewhere in his veins, he knows that this is what happens when you begin to fade and he is not necessarily sad.

He almost dies less than three feet beneath the rest of the world.

But he wonders why he cannot remember a time when he was more alive.

**xxx**

They all become statues.

He floats over them all with the kind of indifference that leaves you breathless.

And he knew their faces once upon a time. But when the months become seasons upon seasons, you find that you cannot remember the sound of their voice or what they believed in or why they cried. The color of their eyes and the scars on their wrists and the endless, endless sound of their voice become nothing more than nothing at all.

And you are left with a name that outlives you if only because it is written on tombstones and printed in newspapers and is something that you whispered over and over again in your sleep because the gunshots gave you nightmares.

They all become ghosts because there is nothing left to say but the things that do not matter.

**xxx**

Callen dies a little bit every day and Sam knows this.

And they carpool and they share cover stories and the things they might have almost forgotten if not for the dog tags and uncertainty.

But what Callen keeps in a safe, Sam keeps in his heart.

Hetty tells them that they will never be anything more than they let themselves be.

That does not make either one of them wrong.

**xxx**

Sam is twelve when he decides he wants to be a Navy SEAL and the idea never leaves him.

He trains and he comes to trust these people who have sacrificed so much to be somewhere not many people really want to be.

He loves and he loses and he makes these desperate amends for wrongs he did not commit.

He lives and he kills and he spares and he fears for his life less than he fears for his friends'.

Once, when the nights have become nearly too long and nerves too thin and hopes too small, he is a Navy SEAL, and all he wants is to be twelve.

The thought makes him ache, but he does not take it back.

**xxx**

Kensi does not cry at night, and she does not leave when you need her and she never stops trying. Sam loves her for the consistency and admires her for her strength but wonders if there was a time when she was happy with herself.

She grieves for a family that they have all been denied and falls asleep to the sound of music that will never be loud enough to hurt.

He leaves himself behind in the desert.

She has yet to find what she is looking for.

**xxx**

There is a time in his life when he is free.

And it is in the sleepy summer of his seventeenth year, when the dirt roads all lead to still ponds with old tire swings that they have broken twice a year since their youth. When he plays football at an old brick school with bright stadium lights that make him feel small and alive with something special and new.

When his best friend is a girl with soft green eyes and long black hair and she holds him close when he tells her he's shipping out in the spring.

When he gets his first tattoo with friends he has now forgotten because he knows he will miss them less when they live on his skin and keep him company in ways no one else can and they become a part of him.

When a car crashes making a left turn at Adams Street at three in the morning and he wonders what his friend was thinking as the glass shattered and tires squealed.

He gets there too late to help and the blood on the pavement disappears in the rain.

The loss he cannot escape begins in those moments when the green light turns red over and over again.

It does not end with the plane ride to Los Angeles.

He doubts it ever really will.

**xxx**

He does not doubt the action itself.

He doubts the meaning behind it.

And on his worst days, he doubts the worth it has at all.

**xxx**

Sam searches for something bigger than himself and finds that he has a strength that the sadness cannot overcome.

He orders coffee on Thursdays and will not watch the news.

The phone must ring four times before he will answer it when he is home alone.

February is his favorite month, but he could not tell you why.

**xxx**

Often times, he dreams in black and white and gray and everything moves in slow motion and he only speaks when the fog turns into rain once again.

He dreams of the flowerbed his first dog ruined and how, when his mother cried at the fallen roses, his heart wrenched at the sight of her tears. He dreams of all the early mornings when he skipped over the loose last stair, but his father woke up anyways and watched him leave for school by the front window and did not wave. He dreams of the first time he was shot at the first time it began to feel numb and the first time he cried because there would never be any way out of the mess he'd dug his way in to.

He dreams in these choppy segments of regret and does not wake to an alarm, but to the silence that will never leave because he cannot let it go.

**xxx**

Part of him never leaves home.

Part of him will suffer eternally in that shallow grave.

Part of him lives by the ocean and will not come back again.

He does not know what to do with himself anymore.

_xxx_


End file.
